


Bad Luck to Break a Mirror

by AstroGirl



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode Related, Gen, Introspection, Villain PoV, filling in missing character development, the twisted relationship between the Doctor and the Master
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:06:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23046004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: How the Master got from where he was to here.
Relationships: The Doctor & The Master (Doctor Who)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17
Collections: Genprompt Bingo Round 17





	Bad Luck to Break a Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "Secrets and Lies." It contains spoilers for the season 12 finale. To say I had issues with the revelations presented in that story would be an understatement, but one thing I _did_ love about it was Sacha Dhawan's Master, and the question of how he might have gotten from where Missy was at the end of "The Doctor Falls" to where he is when he first see him in this regeneration is one that I find fascinating. So I've written my version of that. And I'm going to try very, very hard not to think about the extent to which his anger here might just be a reflection of my own.

He goes back to Gallifrey. He doesn't know what else do to, where else to go, after his unexpected regeneration, his for-once unanticipated survival. He can't quite face the Doctor, not yet. Can't tell him the truth of what happened, can't bear to look him in the eye and let him know about that final decision, that self-sacrifice to give the very phrase "self-sacrifice" new meaning. It's too embarrassing. It's too... new.

So instead he goes home, and maybe it's sentimentality. Maybe he wants to relive his childhood, to remember what it was like, before everything. Just he and the Doctor, young and... Well, perhaps not innocent, not even then. But not yet whatever they were to become. Not yet set on the paths they chose.

He hacks into the Matrix out of simple boredom, nothing more than that. Because Gallifrey _is_ boring, even after everything it's been through, and there is only so much time anyone can spend waxing nostalgic over romps through the grass with their boyhood chum, no matter what it might have led them to later.

But the Matrix is interesting. Knowledge is power; he's always firmly believed that. And it's a challenge. Challenges are fun. Not as much fun as winning them, but he's never doubted his own abilities. (Possibly not even when he should, but he generally prefers to avoid that kind of negative thinking.)

It's also not something that's going to hurt anyone. Well, not directly. He'll always have the option to put whatever he learns to entertainingly evil ends later on, if he changes his mind about that sort of thing again. But the snooping itself? The Doctor wouldn't even disapprove. He's done enough such things himself. Hell, they did a few of them together, back in the old days.

Not that he cares what the Doctor thinks. Of _course_ he doesn't. It's just part of his nostalgic mood, that's all, this feeling that it would be nice for the two of them to stay on the same side, just a little while longer.

He's old enough to be allowed a little nostalgia.

**

It doesn't take him long to find the thing that has been hidden from him, from all of them, for all this time. It doesn't even take him very long to see through the filter protecting it.

Of course it doesn't. He is _the Master_. He has seen things, learned things, done things that even Rassilon could not have imagined. He has held the cosmos in the palm of his hand, knowing that he has the power to squeeze. He is the best, the brightest, the most ambitious child that Gallifrey has ever produced.

Or one of the two, he might have said, in an especially magnanimous mood. If only to himself, he might have said that.

Only _it isn't bloody true_.

The Master's brain is capacious, complex, full of twisting alleyways and secret passages. He is capable of thinking many, many things at once. And so he does.

He thinks: _Doctor, what did they_ do _to you?,_ with a sickened, visceral repugnance he has never felt at any other display of cruelty in the long, cruel history of the universe. These bastards, these hypocrites, these monsters who torture children (and why should they get away with these things, when he didn't, when he never did?), who drive their best and their brightest mad with the pounding of drums (and don't think he's forgotten that, or forgiven, not ever), who steal lives and identities and minds, all the things the Master finds the most terrifying to contemplate losing. _Who hurt his Doctor._ Because the Doctor _is_ his, is his to hurt. No one has ever done it like him and no one could and _where do they get off_ , reaching deeper into the Doctor's past than he ever could, taking more from the Doctor than he ever even knew there was to take? How _dare_ they?

He thinks: It was a lie, all of it, that they were the same, are the same, could ever _be_ the same. They were never even close. Not when he tried to get the Doctor to admit it, to give in to the violence and the need for power inside him. And not later. Not in the vault. Not on the Mondasian ship. It was all a lie, a lie he had believed in enough to _die_ for, enough to _kill himself for_. And in a life that has been made of rage and betrayal, this may be the greatest rage, the greatest betrayal he has ever felt.

He thinks: _I can't escape this. It is inside me_. _It is part of what I am, part of the makeup of my cells. I am a lie, too. I am a_ lie.

He thinks: They will pay. _They will pay_. Tear it all down to the ground. Why not? It never really existed, anyway. Not the parts he cared about. 

He thinks: _They've taken him from me._

He thinks all of these things, very quickly, and then again, very slowly.

And then he stops thinking entirely, and he begins to act instead. Because this is who he is. _This_. Destruction. That is all. His past, his present, his future: destruction. That, at least, is something they cannot take away from him. 

No matter how hard they try.


End file.
